The Most Social Reading Device Ever Built: Lend, Borrow and Share with Friends

Time will tell how true that claim willl be. Anyway, it sounds really good.

NOOKcolor is now available for $249 for pre-order at www.NOOKcolor.com and at Barnes & Noble stores tomorrow, and will begin shipping on or about November 19. Also at the NOOK(TM) Boutique or display at Barnes & Noble bookstore, as well as at Best Buy, Walmart and Books-A-Million starting late November.

"With NOOKcolor, we've combined the functionality and convenience of a 7-inch portable wireless tablet with the reader-centricity of a dedicated eReader, and employed a breakthrough color screen technology that will wow customers," said William Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble. Added Lynch, "NOOKcolor enables Web browsing over Wi-Fi, music, games and much more, but reading anything and everything in brilliant color is the killer app and squarely the product's focus. At $249, NOOKcolor offers a tremendous value, particularly in comparison to the many other 7-inch tablets coming to market at twice the cost and often requiring expensive data plans. Most importantly, NOOKcolor is designed for and differentiated by what Barnes & Noble knows best: reading."

Amazon.com has launched Amazon Windowshop, a complete rewrite of Amazon.com specifically for the iPad. Amazon Windowshop's intimate and fluid user interaction is made possible by the iPad's responsive, multi-touch interface. Amazon Windowshop sets a new bar for e-commerce, and many Amazon customers may prefer Amazon Windowshop even when a large screen web interface is readily available. On the backend, everything remains the same - 49 fulfillment centers with millions of in-stock items that ship with Amazon's customary low prices and fast delivery. But on the front end, customers will experience a new Amazon.com.

"Amazon Windowshop is a top-to-bottom rewrite of Amazon.com - designed and built without compromise just for iPad," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "Try it. I think you'll find it's an amazing new way to shop Amazon's millions of items. Same selection, same low prices, same fast delivery, same benefits of your Amazon Prime membership - just a completely new, fluid interface designed specifically for lean-back, touch screen tablets."
This new experience is designed to make exploring everything from textbooks and jeans, to video games and golf clubs, easy, fun, fast and incredibly useful for iPad owners. Amazon Windowshop is now available for free on the App Store at www.itunes.com/appstore.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Amazon will be introducing a 14-day lending feature for Kindle ebooks later this year, the Kindle team announced yesterday. User won’t be able to read ebooks while they’re lent out. The feature won’t be available for all ebooks either, as it will be entirely up to publishers and rights holders to enable it.

Second, later this year, we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable - this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

The world’s largest bookseller, has announced its award-winning NOOK eBook Reader will be sold in 2,500 Walmart stores (NYSE: WMT) and online at www.walmart.com. The popular NOOK devices are expected to arrive on Walmart shelves beginning as soon as October 24, in advance of the holiday shopping season.

The NOOK eBook Readers will be prominently featured as the premier eBook Reader in the consumer electronics area. Many Walmart stores will feature a NOOK-branded eReading area where shoppers can see and touch a demonstration device.
Walmart will offer both great choice and value with two NOOK by Barnes & Noble eBook Reader models – NOOK 3G, which offers free AT&T 3G wireless and Wi-Fi connectivity, as well as NOOK Wi-Fi, a Wi-Fi only model. Both offer a crisp, paper-like E Ink display for reading and a beautiful color touchscreen for navigation, and access to shop the Barnes & Noble expansive eBookstore with more than one million eBooks, magazines and newspapers, most available for $9.99 or less and more than half a million free titles. Digital content from Barnes & Noble is downloaded wirelessly in seconds. NOOK devices are also the only to offer sharing of eBooks with friends through Barnes & Noble’s breakthrough LendMe™ technology.
“Sales of NOOK devices continue to exceed our expectations, and we are thrilled to be able to partner with Walmart, one of the world’s greatest retailers, to expand the distribution of our award-winning NOOK eBook Reader,” said Chris Peifer, Vice President, Digital Business Development at Barnes & Noble. “Walmart’s millions of shoppers will have an easy and convenient way to try NOOK devices in many stores and to learn why NOOK is the most full-featured eReading device on the market, and the perfect gift solution for anyone who loves to read.”

Just in time for Halloween, Oceanhouse Media introduces two more of their excellent interactive children's storybooks. Both of them are spooky, but certainly not scary, being targeted to the four year old and up crowd. Both are about acceptance and teach a gentle lesson about not judging a book, an empty pair of pants or a pumpkin by its cover.

The first is a short book by Dr. Suess titled What was I Scared of? (US$1.99). It only runs 22 pages so it's priced a dollar less than most of the Oceanhouse Media titles. In it, a very brave furry little guy meets up with a pair of empty pale green pants in the woods that keep popping up wherever he goes.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

An exciting development in the publishing world as Barnes and Noble's PubIt is released, a tool that allows authors to upload their ebooks for sale on the site. On Monday, October 4, 2010, Barnes and Noble announced that PubIt was made available for any author or publisher to upload their ebook titles to the Barnes and Noble website. Up until this point, select authors and titles were allowed to sell ebooks on their website.
Opening up the site for any publisher allows Barnes and Noble to better compete with its largest bookselling competitor, Amazon.com.